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Topic: Is it a gouda mold or a badda mold? (Read 3003 times)

So there's this white stuff turning up on the top and bottom of my gouda...it's about 2nd week into air drying. I'm guessing it's mold, but it's white and doesn't grow upwards at all...in fact, it doesn't wipe of with a little salt water easily at all. I started thinking maybe it's salt deposits from the brining? Can you tell from the pictures?

First off I love the title of this post! I'm probably not the best at helping you guess what this is and I don't think I can figure it out from the pictures. But if it were salt deposits I would think you'd be able to wipe them up with your brine. I guess you could try wiping it down really well with the brine water and then dry the surface and see if it reappears? When you wipe it with brine water does it reappear as soon as the surface dries or over the course of a couple of days. If it is the later it is probably some type of mold.

You could also try white vinegar to wipe it down just to see if it would do anything different. That is about all the advice I can muster right now. Hopefully someone else will chime in here with their words of wisdom!

Thanks for your help! I'm on my first round of cheeses ever, so pretty much any advice is going to be helpful at this point...it seems like a pretty mystical process.

The truth is, it's actually hard to wipe off while I'm wiping it off... so much so that I'm never sure when it reappears (and it does reappear) that it's not just drying out again or something. My guess is that it is indeed a mold, but I was just surprised at how I had to scrub to get it to come off. Maybe it's because the surface is too porous and the mold is getting places I can't scrub? I'm wondering if it's ok to thinly slice or scrape off the surface, if that'll be ok for the rind.

Hmm...I don't know what percent the brine is. I just mixed it until salt gathered at the bottom of the pan like the recipe said...near 2 pounds to a gallon or so. Maybe 1.5 pounds of salt? That is a great idea, though, to re-brine...didn't know it would be ok to do that.

And chilipepper, I started that wheel in the pantry, where the temp and humidity were a bit variable, usually around 62 degrees...and I'm waiting on my hygrometer, so don't know what the humidity was. But now I've got it in a fridge that stays a bit too cold (around 40-45 degrees), but I'm also waiting on a thermostat control too.